P5W DH Deluxe w/mixed SATA and IDE

I've been running my comp with RAID 1 for quite a while and have no problems in that regard but, I recently decided to add Ubuntu to my system and I just can't seem to get it done. At first I used partition magic to downsize the 300GB seagate drive(s) to 270GB on the first partition, leaving about 30GB for installing linux. Well, it seems the Ubuntu install doesn't understand raid 1. It seemed to install fine but after reboot GRUB doesn't appear - no errors or anything. When installing Ubuntu I had to choose between the two raid drives so I figure it installs to one only and the other remains unformatted. On reboot the RAID controller sees the two drives aren't the same and "fixes" it.

So, I set the partition back to the entire drive and decided to install an older Seagate 80 GB Super ATA drive in addition to the SATA raid 1 setup.

The MB has two IDE connectors, one blue which already has my DVD on it and a second black one which is controlled by the JME raid controller. I decided to connect the drive to the blue one since its already working and I don't have to enable the JME system.

I set the 80GB drive to master and DVD to slave and booted up the system. Not unexpectedly, the 80GB drive ended up the boot drive (it was the boot drive on an old comp). So I rebooted again and went to the bios to set the SATA drive array as the boot drive but they do not appear in the boot list! Only the 80GB, DVD, and Floppy do.

I tried setting both drives to cable select (80G as master on black connector and DVD as slave on grey) but then the 80G didn't show up and the SATA drives became the boot device.

Next I enabled the JMicron controller and connected the 80G drive there. Windows boots from the SATA drives and the 80G shows up in explorer etc. I tried to install Ubuntu but the partitioner didn't list the 80G drive, only the SATA ones. The Boot sequence setting in Bios also didn't list the 80G drive.

Anyone have any suggestions? I'd prefer to run Ubuntu off the 80G drive but its not essential. If I could get Ubuntu to install properly on the Intel RAID setup that would be fine too.

Merci!

 

Actually, I'd even be amenable to losing the RAID setup and having windows on one drive and Ubuntu on the other. I did try to disable raid by removing drive two - it booted windows but then simply gave me "serious error" messages until I added the drive back. Attempting to remove drive one screams at me that I'd lose all data.

I have no way of backing up all the stuff on my drive at the moment (on strike, cannot afford a third SATA drive for a while) so wiping out the drive isn't an option at the moment.

Is there a way for me to remove raid yet still keep the drive contents? I would think since its a mirror array there should be a "safe" way to seperate the two.

 

Ok, the mixed stuff turned out to be fairly easy after all. Turns out the Bios not only lets you choose which drive is the boot drive, it also lets you change which drive on the specific controller is first. So I could swap between the RAID as boot or the 80 gig as bootno problem.

I messed around with installing Ubuntu in many different ways and it turns out the only way that worked was to make the 80 gig the first/boot drive and install from there. The grub boot menu lists the raid disks seperately and choosing one or the other will only result in a crash of windows. To switch between Linux and Windows I have to switch the first/boot drive between the 80 gig and the raid.

I also tried adding a 250gig SATA drive to the raid controller as a non-raid disk (first.boot drive) and installing Ubuntu there - simply no go at all. Ubuntu desktop just won't run (get the menu, choose install/run, it shows the loading screen for a bit, then "can't access TTY". With the raid as boot I could install the ubuntu server to the 250 gig but grub doesn't show on reboot. Booting from the Ubuntu desktop CD does show the filesystem exists on the 250 gig, just can't boot it.

Anyway, I have my cake and I'm eating it too - it just doesn't have those little icing rosettes in the corners.